US uses law on aid to post-coup governments as ‘political football’

The US has double standards when it comes to suspending aid to countries where the authorities have been overthrown by force, Egypt and Ukraine are a clear example, Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive Intelligence Review senior editor, told RT.

RT:Ukraine's deposed leader claims
Washington is breaking its own laws when offering money to the
current authorities in Kiev. So does Yanukovich have a point
here?

Jeffrey Steinberg: I think he absolutely has a
point – he’s correct that under US law, all US aid must be
suspended if a legitimately elected government has been
overthrown by military force or other kinds of coup activity.
This is not some esoteric issue; it’s come up in two recent
instances. Number one – in Egypt last summer when the military
stepped in and deposed the Morsi government after tens of
millions of people turned out in the street, there was a
ferocious debate in the Obama administration and in the Congress
over whether it was to be technically labeled a coup, and
ironically, under that debate, Senator John McCain was one of the
leading voices arguing for a total cutoff of all military aid to
Egypt. So now he is on the exact opposite side of the same
debate.

So clearly this law is being used as a political football. It’s
applied in instances where it suits the policies of the
administration and certain hardline allies in congress and it’s
freely ignored when it’s an inconvenient truth. And here in the
case of Ukraine, nobody can dispute the fact that number one, the
Yanukovich government was legitimately elected, and number two
that it was overthrown by military force involving the most
severe right-wing neo-Nazi and neo-fascist elements who were in
the Maidan and who in fact rejected the agreement that was signed
by Yanukovich, the three opposition parties, and the foreign
ministers of Germany, France and Poland, with a Russian observer
present just days before the coup. So I really think it is a case
where Yanukovich has some very legitimate points to be raised,
and I understand he intends to bring this before the US courts
and before the US congress.

RT:A dozen US fighter jets and hundreds of
personnel are off to Ukraine's borders. A Pentagon spokesman says
- quote – “what we are doing is reassuring our allies that we are
there for them.” Where's this heading, do you think?

JS: Well, it’s directed against Russia.
President Obama has had kind of a personal obsession with
President Putin since the beginning of his presidency; it’s one
of the reasons he sent Michael McFaul as a kind of provocation,
‘in your face’ against the Russian government, and I think that
we’ve got to be very blunt here – that when you have NATO and
American military forces right up against the borders of Russia
at the same time that the US is deploying missile defense into
Romania, missile defense systems are now actively present in
western Europe aboard the Arleigh Burke destroyers in Rota,
Spain, that this is not just a danger of a limited confrontation,
but this is a danger of a war that could escalate into a general
war, and even a thermonuclear war confrontation.

Many American analysts – Lyndon LaRouche, the founder of my
publication, Paul Craig Roberts, a number of others, have said
that this administration in Washington, in backing an illegal US
and European funded coup in Ukraine, is running the risk in
greatly escalating the danger of a military confrontation that
could go thermonuclear.